AWS Cost Reduction for a B2B SaaS
A seed-stage B2B SaaS platform noticed their monthly AWS spend steadily rise to $1,850. The engineering team suspected code inefficiencies. 3 Dices completed an architecture review and identified four practical cost drivers: unrouted S3 data transfer over a NAT Gateway, unattached EBS storage, unmanaged CloudWatch logs, and unreserved staging compute. The team resolved these items in 48 hours, saving $480 every month.
The challenge
The company monthly AWS invoice climbed from $1,350 to $1,850 over three months with steady user traffic. As an early-stage startup, every dollar of cloud waste directly reduced runway. The engineering team wanted immediate, safe cost reductions without risking database latency or refactoring application code.
- Monthly AWS invoice increased by $500 without user traffic growth
- Daily database backups to Amazon S3 routed through a paid NAT Gateway
- Six unattached EBS volumes remained billable after test server terminations
- Application log groups stored debug data with infinite retention
Our solution
Private VPC Routing
- Added an Amazon S3 Gateway VPC Endpoint to all private subnet route tables.
- Rerouted 4 TB of monthly backup traffic away from the NAT Gateway.
- Eliminated $180 per month in NAT Gateway data processing fees.
Storage Cleanup and Optimization
- Deleted 6 orphaned 100 GB EBS volumes left from previous staging tests, saving $60 monthly.
- Migrated 600 GB of active storage from gp2 to gp3, reducing disk costs by 20%.
- Retained baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MB/s throughput.
Log Governance and Monitoring
- Updated CloudWatch log group retention policies from Never Expire to 14 days.
- Reduced log storage footprint by 1.2 TB, saving $36 monthly.
- Configured AWS Budgets email alerts at 80% and 100% of the target $1,400 monthly baseline.
The results
Cost Savings
- Monthly bill reduced from $1,850 to $1,370
- 26% permanent reduction in recurring cloud spend
- $5,760 in annual runway preserved for product engineering
Network & Architecture
- S3 backup transfers stay within the high-speed AWS internal network
- Zero data transfer charges between VPC instances and S3
Governance
- Clean EBS volume state with automated monthly cleanup tags
- Automated budget alerts warn founders before unexpected bill spikes occur
Technologies & AWS services
- AWS VPC
- VPC Endpoints
- NAT Gateway
- Amazon S3
- Amazon EBS (gp3)
- CloudWatch
- AWS Budgets
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